Film series brings classics to IU Cinema

On a bright Sunday afternoon in Bloomington, student and cinephiles alike gathered at the IU Cinema for its screening of “Stella Dallas.”

Originally a book by Olive Higgins Prouty, the 1937 feature film starring Barbara Stanwyck was shown on Aug. 28 as part of the City Lights Film Series. City Lights focuses on classic Hollywood films.

The series is headed by Department of Communication and Culture graduate students.

This year, the department’s graduate students James Paasche and Landon Palmer selected all the films from IU’s David S. Bradley collection of about 3,900 shows.

“(Stanwyck) plays this mother who is sacrificing herself for her daughter,” Paasche said. “She’s so strong in it. The other people around her can’t keep up.”

While the City Lights series has been running for more than a decade, the opening of the IU Cinema in spring 2011 provided an outlet to renew interest in the project.

“Five or six people would show for the first screening. It was a cool tradition, but not many people took advantage of it,” Paasche said. “Now that we have this facility, the screenings I went to (in the spring) had well over a hundred people each.”

The screening is also one of the last events listed under IU’s inaugural Summer Festival of the Arts, or “113 Days of Art,” which was used as an organizing tag for summer arts and entertainment events on campus.

All IU Cinema screenings this summer were included in the festival.

“We’re very happy to be a part of the Summer Festival of Arts,” said Jon Vickers, director of the IU Cinema. “We’ve been able to offer quite a volume of things to fill in some of the gaps that music, museums and theatre and drama couldn’t."

Six more films will be shown from the City Lights series this semester, including a double feature of “Altered States” and “Carrie” on Oct. 30.

IU Cinema has 120 total screenings scheduled for fall semester, most of which are free or offer discounted ticket rates for students.